ILS Task Force Meeting Minutes for August 27, 2012

In attendance: Donna Morris, Anne Fischer, Karen Marriott, Lloyd Lovely, Kay Bauman

Anne updated the group on the communication she has had with the vendors since our demos (view vendor demostration notes).

Polaris sent information on a test system and she can now see the administrative module.  However, it’s the previous version.  They will upgrade the test system soon.  The new version of Polaris is a complete revision so it is not really comparable with the previous version.

Innovative Interfaces’ Sierra is brand new and Anne has been trying to determine whether any library has it live right now.  She has learned that it is not in general release at this time. The beta was released in November 2011 and was suppose to be available by April 2012.  Anne has spoken with someone at the Jefferson County Public Library and they are agreeable to allow us to visit them later.  They are a development partner with Innovative Interfaces and they have been using the beta version since June 2012. At this time, Jefferson is simultaneously running the old version with the beta version.   It appears that Innovative Interfaces is still selling their old version of Millennium.

MLS needs to believe that the company we select is strong and likely to remain in business for years and years.  Several years ago SIRSI was purchased by Vista Equity Partners.  Innovative Interfaces was more recently purchased by two private equity firms and they kept their management team, (Source: Innovative Interfaces Joins the Private Equity Club).

The 3 vendors that saw our Big Bin wanted to bring their vice president of development to see it because they were quite impressed.

Once we see the TLC demo our next step is to get a rough draft of the RFP (Request for Proposals).  We need to decide on what questions we need to ask for when we visit some libraries to see the systems.  Following those steps we can finalize the RFP and prepare to send that out.

Our next meeting is September 11, 2012 to see the TLC demo.